Something cool about Perl 6 every day

Primary Menu

Day 3 – File operations

Instead of opendir and friends, in Perl 6 there is a single dir subroutine, returning a list of the files in a specified directory, defaulting to the current directory. A piece of code speaks a thousand words (some result lines are line-wrapped for better readability):

When the standard features are not enough, modules come in handy. File::Find (available in the File::Tools package) traverses the directory tree looking for the files you need, and generates a lazy lists of the found ones. File::Find comes shipped with Rakudo Star, and can be easily installed with neutro if you have just a bare Rakudo.

Example usage? Sure. find(:dir<t/dir1>, :type<file>, :name(/foo/)) will generate a lazy list of files (and files only) in a directory named t/dir1 and with a name matching the regex /foo/. Notice how the elements of a list are not just plain strings: they’re objects which strinigify to the full path, but also provide accessors for the directory they’re in (dir) and the filename itself (name). For more info please refer to the documentation.